Can't get multiple material elements in UDK to work

mixeh

Hi all,

My mesh consists of multiple different objects, that I need to assign different materials to in UDK. When I export from 3DS Max, I'm not getting these different objects having their individual elements show up under the LOD info in the static mesh properties such that I can plug in the appropriate material.

I believe I need to assign a different material ID to each object that will have its own material in UDK, but I'm not really sure if I'm doing it right, currently I just have different blinns applied to the seperate objects when I export, but it doesn't seem to work. Anyone know what I could be doing wrong?

Thanks.

Arnage

You indeed need to make sure that every object has a unique material id. The easiest way to do that is to just apply one multi/sub-object material to everything, with your individual materials as sub materials.

This should be enough when you export as a fbx, however if you use ase's you need to do one more step: you need to make sure that every sub-material has a unique diffuse texture applied in max, because otherwise unreal won't recognize them as separate and merge them into one material. This texture can be any temp texture as long as it's a unique one per sub-material.

That problem has been in unreal for ages now, not sure why they haven't fixed it yet. (maybe it's inherent in the way stuff is saved in ase files?)

Mik2121

In 3DSMax have only a Multi/Sub-Object material applied to the whole thing, and have different IDs set up and assigned to whatever you want. Remember to delete the IDs you don't use because the default Multi/Sub-Object has 15 IDs (I'm not sure, but they might show up).

Ben Apuna

You also need to actually assign a texture to each material with a different material ID otherwise they won't show up after export to ASE, or at least that's how it used to be...

The texture doesn't matter it can just be a placeholder.

Sean VanGorder

Yeah, Ben Apuna has the right idea. The ID's won't show up in Unreal unless you export them with placeholder textures.

mixeh

thanks guys, i'll give it a shot now and see how i go

mixeh

Okay that worked, thanks a million guys.

adam

I'm getting the same issue, only exporting to ASE.

My object, in Max, has a multi sub on it with 2 id's. Each ID has a placeholder texture on it. The object has the 2 id's assigned to it on different faces. I export that ASE to Unreal, import, and it only has 1 Material option.

Ideas?

adam

Fixed: The issue was when I originally made the 2nd ID i had copied it from the first. So while their temp textures were different, the mat names were the same. Renaming the mat's fixed it.

kurt_hectic

Had it the same:
create all your ID's in material and assign textures to it, that will get rid off all issues wth ID's.

VisceralD

Hey guys I had the same problem, and tried all the tricks suggested in the forum. I even redid the materials and renamed them several times. After experimenting with this enough I figured out that collision mesh was causing the problem. So if I take off the collision mesh the materials show up just fine. And if i don't the materials show up as one. Any suggestions on how to fix my situation?